ptownson@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Patrick Townson) (12/07/88)
Regards my previous posting just now, before someone writes back saying, "Well Mr. Townson, your Digest going out in duplicate accidentally as often as not is hardly in keeping with your thoughts about conserving network resources..." let me say -- Another problem that certainly contributes to network/machine congestion is the multiplicity of sendmail programs around each doing their own thing at the expense of net traffic. When a machine somewhere along the route duplicates a large newsletter to a large list, everyone involved is hurt. A priority ought to be standardizing the mailers and finding out why some of them routinely (it seems) repeat everything they are given. I've had people stop taking [Telecom Digest] because frankly, we could not get the sendmail under control and we were running them out of storage space. Likewise the Mail Daemons: do they *really* have to return the full text of every message? If I get 39 Daemons in one day due to the present fiasco with the worm, and every Daemon carries a full 11K worth of what went out originally, this is another huge abuse of space is it not? They should return the transaction information, and maybe a line or two of message text. The rest is very wasteful. No one ever dreamed the net and its two components mail and news would ever grow to the size they are. Now might be a good time to begin making some radical changes if we expect the net to keep standing under its own weight. Patrick